by Leila Rafei
What an awful person he’d become. A waste of Suad’s righteous upbringing. A demon like the one on the mountain. He knew that was why he saw it.
Of course, he couldn’t go back to sleep. All he could do was wait for another car to pass, the way he might wait for a ghost to reappear just to make sure he’d actually seen it. This must be what Rose referred to as the witching hour—the last moments of darkness before dawn. When paranormal activity was at its peak, reality blurred in the transitioning night. In Cairo, the muezzin would be calling out the day’s first prayer, and birds would be chirping even in the still-dark sky. Back home he’d hear the churn of factories, the constant whirl of the neighbor’s cotton wheel. But here, there was no muezzin or birds or wheel. The mountain had disappeared. The sea was undetectable except for the slow lick of the water, itself too faint to hear without trying. Even the sky, crowded with stars, couldn’t dispel the beast in his head. He grabbed the sand in his fists as he stared above, feeling as if the galaxy could suck him into the ether if he let go.
*****
He woke up on a bed of flattened sand, the roll-up cushion lying beside him. He was alone. Rose must have left to take a shower. He lit a cigarette and stared at the sea, savoring this moment before he’d have to face her.
The water was flat and shallow, so transparent he could see all the coral sprawling under the surface. How different it was from the Alexandrian coast just a few weeks ago, where the sea had been gray to match low-hanging clouds. To be fair, January was a bad time of year to visit. That a local church had been bombed during the same weekend—on New Years’ Eve, nonetheless—only helped set the tone for a terrible trip. Sami remembered hearing the warbling voice of Umm Kalthoum on the radio as he and Rose sat at a seaside café, holding hands under the table, and the way it faded into white noise when she told him. The loosening grip of her hands as she realized the extent of his horror. The water reddening from the blood of spearfishing. The foam capping the waves like a rabid mouth coming for them. Those words, I’m—you know, had morphed the whole coast into a hellscape.
That feeling was still with him here. Maybe it had nothing to do with the weather after all. In fact, he was even more bothered by the brightness of the sun in Ras Shaitan, and the pink glow of the hills on the opposite coast. It all seemed to taunt him. Look at all you’d enjoy if you hadn’t gotten into this mess. He tried to orient himself—if Mahalla was west, then Dammam was east, and that meant his father was somewhere over those eastern hills, watching, judging. Though he stared, cigarette burning, he felt no longing.
When he reached the cigarette’s filter, he realized Rose had been gone longer than expected. She’d left the journal among her things in the sand. Now was his chance. He looked over his shoulder and reached for the journal. Before opening it, he took time to admire it in his hands. It was a rare find, a classic beauty bound in leather imprinted with a floral pattern like henna. Made for her, made for him to find in Khan El Khalili. He cracked open the cover with the tip of his finger, then shut it and opened it again. It wasn’t right to read her journal, but he figured there were no boundaries between them now, and after all, he’d bought it.
On the first page, she’d written her name in both English and Arabic, the latter with exaggerated curls. Then the line, once you drink from the Nile, you are destined to return. It was an old fable, a cliché among foreigners. Amusing to Rose and concerning to Sami. A returning Rose seemed like more trouble than he’d anticipated. Strange that she’d copied that line onto the very first page, as if declaring the journal’s purpose, the way he might write physics in a school notebook. It hadn’t been funny when Sami tried using it to cheer her up between heaves. Now it was a mantra.
All Sami knew was that expats loved it. He couldn’t blame them—expats did seem to always come back. Freshman year, Hamza kissed a British girl behind the library at lunch hour. He cried when she went home at the end of the semester—and again when she returned a year later on holiday. Even his hydrocarbon professor, Mr. Schlum, who you’d think would be immune to such superstitions, had come back to Cairo after growing up in Maadi with his diplomat parents. Eternal return. Was it magic or a self-fulfilling prophecy? All roads will lead back to Cairo if you believe it. Even the literal act of drinking Nile water was unavoidable—after all, it ran through the taps. When he first met Rose she was so worried about her delicate stomach that she brushed her teeth with bottled water. Now she used the tap like him. Sometimes she’d play it safe by ordering sodas and fruit cocktails and beers, only to unwittingly suck up the melted remains of ice cubes through her straw. Tap water. And how many feluccas had they taken up and down the river? Surely, at some point some droplets of river had spurted out of motors to land on her lips. Straight Nile water.
In fact, there was one night last summer that she ingested far more than a stray droplet. After drinking too many Stellas on a dinner cruise, she was so out of it that when a man from the street handed her a tin cup of tap water from a fountain by the river, she drank it. Rose always told the tale with a smile creeping up her lips in amusement, like one hell of a morning-after drunk story, the punchline being the simple fact that she drank from a communal cup on the side of the road, full of water pumped from the river where dead donkeys and other carcasses lay to rest. By the next morning, not much of the stuff remained in her body, but surely some worm or microorganism must have made its way into her bloodstream and stuck. That meant she’d one day return to Egypt. Without Sami. He turned the page to find his name at the top, then braced himself.
Sami teases me for sleeping so much, as if it means I’m at peace somehow, like all is fine and dandy, peaches and cream. Even Jamila judges me for it. I could see it in her eyes in the kitchen the other day. If only she knew about the pregnancy. I want to tell her.
He set down the journal. If he had an eraser, he’d wipe those words off the page and pretend he’d read no such thing. If the words didn’t exist, then what happened hadn’t happened, he could toss the journal into the sea and tell Rose a falcon swooped down to snatch it. But the words were there, and there was no eraser, and what happened had happened. Slowly, he breathed in and returned to the page.
I want to tell her. Woman to woman, both young and pregnant, both pretty much alone. But it was that look that stopped me. She looked tired – tired of work, tired of me. Like she wanted me to just leave her alone. So I did.
I wish they knew that there’s no rest in my sleep. I wake up covered in sweat, sheets soaked to the mattress. And there are only bad dreams. Maybe it’s a side effect of pregnancy. Maybe it’s the hash he’s always smoking. Maybe it’s everything.
The dreams keep getting worse. An injured palomino pulling a cart full of bricks uphill, limping. A coyote trailing us up the mountains, waiting till we tire out enough to be his dinner. We’re riding a rollercoaster holding champagne glasses, trying not to break them. I’m about to miss my flight home and I’m still packing, trying to stuff all my things in a suitcase that can’t hold it all. Crowds bidding on a goat in Souk El Gomaa, spitting prices based on the quality of the meat.
The last takes place in the Diesel. It’s dark and smells like trash, and I can feel grime under my bare feet as I give birth in the open hall. Sami’s sitting between my legs, eating a bowl of koshari or something. Nonchalant. He doesn’t even help as I push and push. He just stares down at me with that weird, distant look, like he doesn’t know what to make of the mother of his child. A non-Muslim, non-Egyptian, nonvirgin, nonentity. Unsuitable, unreasonable, impossible, implausible. Godless and rootless and youthless. He’s known it all along, pressing it down, but every once in a while, it’ll dawn on him. I can see it in his face. Even while giving birth to his child. In the dream, I pull it out of myself while he sits there watching, judging, chomping on chickpeas. When I see it, I scream. It’s deformed, face like a fruit fly. Skin gray, like it’s not even alive. And when I look at Sami, all he does is shrug.
Sami held the book open for a few silent minutes, stuck on a page he desperately wanted to turn. The dream was disturbing, yes, but so was what she thought of him. He supposed he could have brushed it off, called it nonsense from the subconscious mind, but then he’d be lying to himself. What she described was truer than any waking moment—his distance, all the worries he suppressed, even his judgment (which to be fair, was more his mother’s than his own, but racked his mind nonetheless). He might have had a word with her if there were anything he could say. What? That she’s wrong—that she is indeed suitable and reasonable and possible and plausible? No, then he’d be adding to his list of mistakes. It was a long one, growing by the minute.
When he heard the door swing shut from the main hut, he set the book down where Rose had left it, went back to his own, and tried to act natural. Smoking—no, staring at the sea.
They spent the rest of the day passing time under a straw canopy. Rose continued writing as Sami sneaked glances, hoping he hadn’t left behind an eyelash or fingernail to prove his lurking. On his lap sat one of her books on ancient Egypt, earmarked and highlighted like a textbook. In the Time of the Pharaohs. She read that stuff for fun. It must be how she knew all that mumbo jumbo about the snake on the mountain trail. He dusted off sand between the pages and flipped to the index to look up S for snake. His eyes flitted up and down the list of entries. Snake, god. Snake, ouroboros. Snake, uraeus. He flipped to the first.
Apep, or Apophis to the Greeks, was a freakish serpent god, ruler of chaos and conflict, frequent antagonist to the big god, Ra. To think, there was a time when there were not only multiple gods, but imperfect gods, gods with names and personal beef. Gods like Apep who slithered up from the underworld and ate the sun. Sami cringed, picturing jaws unhinging. He learned that the ancient Egyptians prayed to keep Apep away, and priests wrote manuals on how to fight him. There, he thought, fingering the page. In Apep, Sami found vindication for his fear of snakes. Here was proof that his fear was ancestral, perfectly natural. It ran through his blood the same as genes for big eyes and curly hair.
He looked over at Rose, whose pencil moved furiously across the pages of her journal. She hadn’t mentioned Apep before. Probably because it didn’t support her contrarian argument. She had already read about the snake god—he could tell by the creased pages, dog-eared at the corner, the circle she’d drawn over antithesis of order and light. Yet she was still unafraid, or at least pretended to be. Snakes have a bad rep.
Beasts in his head, he couldn’t help thinking of the mountain demon. Up on the cliffs, he tried tracing the crags to find the missing beast. But there was no demon in the daylight. Not even bits and pieces he could draw together like a constellation. All he saw was a mountain, unremarkable except for its beauty, rocks like any other.
*****
Today the cook served an unfortunate lunch of roast goat, stewed Moroccan style with cinnamon and raisins. Rose refused, saying she felt nauseous. Sami tried not to think of her nightmares as he gorged on two servings too delicious to turn away. Besides, it would have looked suspicious. His eyes scanned Rose periodically as she picked at a bowl of coagulated foul. It seemed she hadn’t noticed him snooping.
In the main hut, he found more campers than he’d thought were there. An Australian with blond dreadlocks. A pair of sunburnt Europeans. A guitarist in a reggae band, stranded on his way to a show in Cairo. A month ago. They all blamed the revolution for their extended stays, saying the roads were unsafe. And if the revolution never ended? All the better. They thought Sami and Rose were crazy for planning to head out that day, but their reaction only fueled his urge to go. He needed to get back to Cairo, where a revolution continued without him, where the chaos crushed his own thoughts, where even the blast of a gunshot was about as significant as a penny splashing into the sea.
The news blared from a radio in the kitchen—something about bombs, something about revolution, something that had set the sleepy camp abuzz. Everybody huddled around Zane, who sat cross-legged with a fresh scarf tied around his head, taking questions as if he were an expert.
“Is it true that the Islamists are behind this?”
“What do you think will happen if the regime falls?”
As Sami sawed off a sliver of goat meat, he wondered if Zane had ever seen the cliffside demon. Probably not. The man was too busy running his mouth, spreading false information just as deftly as state news. According to him, there was no youth movement and there was no Tahrir. There was the regime and the Islamists, and your choice was one or the other. Sami spoke up when he couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’ve been to Tahrir. It’s not like that.”
“Don’t be naive,” said Zane, cigarette dangling from his gesticulating finger. “This country is much bigger than whichever corner you staked out in Tahrir. Where were you, by the KFC? Kind of says it all, doesn’t it? There are places that don’t even have a KFC. You’re in one right now.”
Sami didn’t need to be told of such places, and by an American at that. He reminded him that he was from Mahalla, a place Rose might call “the real Egypt,” and that he may not have been everywhere, but he’d surely seen more than Zane had. At least, in his head he had. In his defense, it was hard to get a word in with Zane yammering away, impressed with his own voice and stature among the clueless campers—all foreigners except for the guitarist, who was too high to care.
“If the regime falls, it’ll be Saudi Arabia up in here in a month, tops. Your girlfriend’s going to have to wear a burka and you can kiss your Stellas goodbye. So enjoy this place while you can.”
Sami looked around, hoping to find just one fellow skeptic, but there weren’t any.
“Stability is key,” said the cook of all people. He was a poor man from Kafr El Sheikh, the sort who should be fighting for bread, freedom, and social justice in Tahrir. Maybe he didn’t want to go against his boss—the boss who thought he had flesh in the game despite his ability to fly back to America the second the shit hit the fan. Yet the cook seemed sincere when he leaned in and said, “But if anything happens, I hope America puts a good president for us.”
At this the other campers laughed. One of the Europeans chimed in.
“That’s not how democracy works, my friend.”
“That’s the thing,” said Zane. “Egypt isn’t ready for democracy. When my illiterate housekeeper can read the difference between bleach and detergent before she does my laundry, then maybe I’ll consider it.”
Sami’s head spun. Dictatorship is good. Freedom is bad—they’ll fuck it up. Democracy is impossible, untranslatable. He lit a cigarette without realizing and swiftly butted it out when he noticed. He shouldn’t look nonchalant like Zane, no—that was the difference between them. Zane was a spoiled pseudo-Egyptian who didn’t get it. Sami was the real deal, from fucking Mahalla via Tahrir Square. He was about to jump in and set everyone straight, but Rose beat him to it.
“That’s because of the poverty. Squatters living on rooftops. Kids selling tissues on the street. Donkeys in the middle of traffic. It all goes back to that.”
Zane stood up and dusted sand off his knees. “Poverty sucks, Rose, but let’s face it. This is a third world country. If some people are poor but the country is at peace, then it’s worth it. Maybe you’ve been brainwashed by country folks, people who wouldn’t mind the beards taking over. And now you’re asking for too much, just like them. Last year the Brotherhood finally got permission to run for office and then they still bitched. Sorry, y’all won five seats. The year before, it was what—prison time for even thinking of joining? So, get over it. Everybody needs to think about how bad it could get. Let’s not push it.”
Zane had wanted the last word, but Rose—sweet Rose and that baby-induced nausea—wouldn’t let him. She keeled over to the side, covering her mouth, and inched like a slug toward the sea, where she retched.
*****
&n
bsp; Hours later, as they stood with their bags on the desert road, Sami realized what the radio had been blaring about in the main hut. A church had been bombed in Rafah last night, which was why the bus station was closed. Now the only way home was to hitchhike.
They sat on their bags with a scarf draped over their heads for shade. Long intervals passed between any signs of life beyond a distant car or tumbleweed. Beads of sweat became puddles between their skin. To stay awake, they found entertainment in anything that stirred—a strange insect carrying a twig across the road, a big bird flying past (sign of a carcass somewhere near), wild dogs barking in the mountains. When a pickup truck appeared on the horizon, Sami jumped to his feet to flag it, but the driver made no move for the brakes and simply drove on, elbow sticking out the window. This would be harder than he thought.
He turned to face Rose from his spot in the middle of the road, where he straddled a blank space that should have been painted with a dotted line. As he walked back to her, the words of Zane and the other campers rattled through his head, imprinted on the mountains and the sea.
“Why did you move here if it’s so bad?”
“What do you mean? I love it here.”
“You know what I mean. The poverty. The backwardness. The army.” When he realized he was using air quotes again he snapped his hands back to his sides. Rose and her Americanisms were seeping into his every move whether he liked it or not.